Review Reports - Coordinated Development Evaluation of Population–Land–Industry in Counties of Western China: A Case Study of Shaanxi Province

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript designed dural coupling coordination of population, land, and industry for checking the urbanization in the western part of China.

In the abstract, the authors claim that evaluation of the coordinated development of county urbanization can provide a basis for enhancing public service functions in urban-rural harmonious development. But, they argue that industrial agglomeration is the main factor in the process of urbanization in western china. How about the public facilities in this manuscript?

The relationship between urbanization development and that coupling coordination is not explained from the view of so-called "increment" and "quality improvement", and core-edge discussed in the abstract. It is necessary to describe the contribution to literature clearer.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, First of all, we would like to thank you for your affirmation on the significance of research. Your pertinent review suggestions should well guide the quality improvement of this paper. We responded to the comments point by point, and explained our modification work for each comment. Please see the attachment. Sincerely all the authors of this paper

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper examines the urbanization levels of a specific area of China considering the fourteenth five-year plan. It is built an index based on the entropy weight method. The work is correlated by a number of graphs and diagrams. The work is of interest for the journal but needs some major and minor amendments.

As far as the introduction is concerned, I suggest focusing more on the concept of urbanization of rural spaces. It would also be important to add a few lines in which you explain the subdivision of the paper into its sections.

The paragraphs on the study area and statistical resources are clear, while paragraph 2.3 Construction of County Urbanization Index System would need more scientific references to support the paper.

With regard to the numerous graphs in the paper, I recommend that you include the source and the year of publication.

A linguistic review of English, typos and formatting errors is recommended (see, for instance, the abstract and line 66). All brackets should be anticipated by a space " (" not "(".

The reviewed literature is not yet complete. I recommend deepening the level and themes of analysis and to add some methodological reference reading to international scholarship. I suggest these papers that support the urbanization link of rural areas and rural development:

Cattivelli, V., (2020), The methods of the identification of urban, rural and peri-urban areas in Europe. An overview. Journal of Urban Regeneration & Renewal, Vol. 14, 3, 1-7
Cattivelli, V., & Rusciano, V. (2020). Social innovation and food provisioning during COVID-19: The case of urban–rural initiatives in the province of Naples. Sustainability, 12(11), 4444.

It is enthralling that you used the entropy weight method based on multi-index synthesis as a way to tackle subjective weighting evaluation. Further methods could be considered when calculating indexes or at least kept for future research with the scope of granting robustness to the exercise. Besides this aspect, the conclusions are consistent with the objectives of the paper and the limitations and insights for future research are appropriate. See:

Drago, C., & Gatto, A. (2018, March). A robust approach to composite indicators exploiting interval data: The interval-valued global gender gap index (IGGGI). In IPAZIA Workshop on Gender Issues (pp. 103-114). Springer, Cham.

Figures 5 and 7 are blurry - may you please improve their quality?

Please, capitalize on the directions when referred to as nouns - e.g. North region, Western China, etc.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, First of all, we would like to thank you for your affirmation and encouragement on the significance of research. You not only put forward problems to this paper, but also gave corresponding guidance to our research carefully. We are particularly grateful for your careful guidance. Your pertinent review suggestions should well guide the quality improvement of this paper. we responded to the comments point by point, and explained our modification work for each comment. Please see the attachment Sincerely all the authors of this paper

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The subject of the article is interesting and it is linked to the objectives of the journal, however, there are a minor issues that have to be reconsidered.

For a better visibility on databases, the authors are asked not to repeat among keyword the words/concepts included on the title of the article.

Beside that, the article sounds solid.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, We would like to thank you for your affirmation and encouragement on the significance of research. Thank reviewer for careful observation of the English writing of this paper. Your pertinent review suggestions should well guide the quality improvement of this paper. For your suggestion, we have revised the whole paper.

Response to Reviewer 3 Comments

Point: The subject of the article is interesting and it is linked to the objectives of the journal, however, there are a minor issues that have to be reconsidered. For a better visibility on databases, the authors are asked not to repeat among keyword the words/concepts included on the title of the article.

Response:

First of all, we would like to thank you for your affirmation and encouragement on the significance of research. Thank reviewer for careful observation of the English writing of this paper. Your pertinent review suggestions should well guide the quality improvement of this paper. For your suggestion, we have revised the whole paper. See the revised manuscript.

In addition, we also make the following modifications to improve this paper:

First of all, we reconstructed the process of theoretical demonstration. From the perspective of rural urbanization, we re-demonstrated the significance and particularity of county urbanization. Meanwhile, we discussed the relationship between County Economic and social development and public infrastructure from the background of China's urbanization. Besides, we further clarified the core-edge structure characteristics of urbanization development level and its coupling coordination degree.

Secondly, we added the scientific demonstration in the process of index construction and calculation. To increase the scientific basis for the index selection and add a robustness analysis of the algorithm by comparing results get from four calculation methods.

Finally, we adjust the logic and details of the whole article comprehensively. We added a structure description, raised the clarity of maps, added description of the source and year of figures, etc.

Please review the details in the revised manuscript, thank you again!

Sincerely all the authors of this paper

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for considering the suggested amendments. The revised version led to substantial improvements. I recommend the following minor issues. In my opinion, once addressed those edits, the paper will be ready for publication.

The authors did a good job of improving the robustness section. Though additional efforts are needed to explain the exercise and valorise it. Please, check:
- Joint Research Centre-European Commission. (2008). Handbook on constructing composite indicators: methodology and user guide. OECD publishing.

Importantly, please check carefully the text and cleanse it from any typo. I recommend the intervention of a native English speaker. For instance, remove this major typo L78 "Error! Reference source not found.错误!未找到引用源。23].T".
As far as the authors added a considerable subsection on rural development, the following report might be of help to corroborate some statement and discussion on rural revitalisation for socioeconomic goals and policy.
- Gatto, A., Polselli, N., & Bloom, G. (2016). Empowering gender equality through rural development: Rural markets and micro-finance in Kyrgyzstan. L’Europa e la Comunità Internazionale Difronte alle Sfide dello Sviluppo, 65-89.

I appreciate the issue with figures quality but please, improve figg. 5 and 7. Try uploading different formats. You can try to use the vectorial format for instance.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Considering your suggestion, we have further improved the paper point by point. In order to distinguish from the previous amendments, this revision was been highlighted. Please review the details as below.

Sincerely all the authors of this paper

Point 1: The authors did a good job of improving the robustness section. Though additional efforts are needed to explain the exercise and valorise it. Please, check:

Joint Research Centre-European Commission. (2008). Handbook on constructing composite indicators: methodology and user guide. OECD publishing.

Response 1: We are especially grateful for the handbook recommended by reviewer. The last revision was a method we found out by reading a lot of relevant literature in a short time, but this handbook gives a clear and complete idea. According to this handbook, we modified the paper and add the description of the robust test methods selection and the explanation of the results. See the 2^nd paragraph in Robustness Analysis on page 7, the first 2 paragraphs on page 13, the last column of Table 2 on page 13, and the Figure 6 on page 13. In addition, this book is also very helpful to the paper we are writing at present. Thank you very much.

Point 2: Importantly, please check carefully the text and cleanse it from any typo. I recommend the intervention of a native English speaker. For instance, remove this major typo L78 "Error! Reference source not found.错误!未找到引用源。23].T".

Response 2: We are sorry that as it was late at night before submission last time, so we hadn’t notice the cross reference error. After finalized the manuscript, we have removed the cross reference link of the whole paper to avoid such problems. At the same time, for the typo problem, we invited an English teacher to help check. We modified the whole paper again. See blue words in revised manuscript.

Point 3: As far as the authors added a considerable subsection on rural development, the following report might be of help to corroborate some statement and discussion on rural revitalisation for socioeconomic goals and policy.

Gatto, A., Polselli, N., & Bloom, G. (2016). Empowering gender equality through rural development: Rural markets and micro-finance in Kyrgyzstan. L’Europa e la Comunità Internazionale Difronte alle Sfide dello Sviluppo, 65-89.

Response 3: Thanks for the review's recommendation, the agricultural economic development argumentation and policy recommendations of this paper are very helpful to our research. According to this paper, we further refined the Introduction and Conclusions, see the 1^st and 5^th paragraph in section 1 on page 1 to 3 and the 2^nd paragraph in section 5 on page 23.

Point 4: I appreciate the issue with figures quality but please, improve fig. 5 and 7. Try uploading different formats. You can try to use the vectorial format for instance.

Response 4: We consulted a cartographer, and improved figure 5 from 441KB to 1.67MB, and figure 7 from 697KB to 1.27MB successfully. Now the figures look much clearer. New figures see figure 5 on page 12 and figure 8 on page 15.